The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

Isha Nagpal

Famous journalist John Colapinto wrote the biography of a man and named the book, “As Nature made him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl”. The book explains the story of baby boy Bruce who was eight months old when he was taken by his parents, along with his twin brother, for a circumcision operation. Some complications arose in Bruce’s operation that led to his penis being permanently affected and the doctors were left with little choice than to remove the penis. This caused a lot of agony among the parents who then went to several specialists to try and understand any possible solutions to this problem. This is when they bumped into a famous psychologist and sexologist at that time, John Money, who suggested to them that the best way to go forward would be to surgically construct a vagina for baby Bruce, to raise him as a girl and to hide the truth about his infancy. Hearing this, the parents agreed to another surgery for the boy in which his testes were surgically removed and a new vulva was fashioned. It was decided that Bruce would now be raised as a girl named Brenda. But all did not go well. (Colapinto, 2000)

This solution did not work as expected. As much as Bruce’s parents tried to impose more feminine ways of living she kept rejecting them more and more. When she reached 13 years of age, Brenda was diagnosed with depression and with advice from her psychiatrist, her parents revealed to her that she was born a boy. Following this, she changed her name from Brenda to David and decided to adopt a male identity. He also went on to get surgeries to reverse the gender reassignment. (Colapinto, 2000) This entire case has been brought to notice several times since then and has always led to the debate about the role of nature v/s nurture when it comes to gender identity. For a long time, psychologists have given nurture the upper hand in this debate. However, these notions have been broken by many psychologists such as Carol Nagy Jacklin and Eleanor Maccoby who wrote a book named, “The Psychology of Sex Differences”, in which they have regarded both biological and social factors as causes for sex differences and have also raised questions on the consistency of these differences. (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974) These notions were also broken once cases like that of David Reimer were brought into the picture and the harsh consequences of such experiments were seen.

Another such research was one done by Milton Diamond and H. Keith Sigmundson who revisited David Reimer’s case and concluded that, “The evidence seems overwhelming that normal humans are not psychosexually neutral at birth but are, in keeping with their mammalian heritage, predisposed and biased to interact with environmental, familial, and social forces in either a male or female mode”. (Diamond & Sigmundson, 1997) However, we cannot rule out the possibility that the nurture part of our experience influences the way we view ourselves and also might slightly affect our gender identity. This debate does not stop here and as demonstrated in Eagly and Wood’s paper, “The Nature-Nurture Debates: 25 Years of Challenges in Understanding the Psychology of Gender”, this debate has taken many twists and turns without ever reaching a conclusion. (Eagly &Wood, 2013) It has manifested itself in many areas of psychology but gender becomes one of the most crucial areas of this debate. Due to the kind of effect that gender identities have on a person’s upbringing in the present society, it becomes necessary to understand the roles played by both nature and nurture. But unfortunately, there are no right answers when we delve into this area.

This debate has had many disadvantages for many social groups in our society because they have been viewed with suspicion due to our sheer lack of understanding of their struggle. A society which categorizes people into men and women hardly provides space for people who do not comply with either group in terms of their physiology or psychology. With a rapidly growing acknowledgement of diversity in gender identity and a newfound gender-fluidity has opened up more areas of psychological debate which need to be talked about and addressed urgently. 

References

Colapinto, J. (2001). As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1974). The psychology of sex differences. : Stanford University Press.

Diamond, M., & Sigmundson, H. K. (1997). Sex Reassignment at Birth: A Long Term Review and Clinical Implications. Archives Of Paediatric And Adolescent Medicine.

Eagly, A., & Wood, W. (2013). The Nature-Nurture Debates: 25 Years of Challenges in Understanding the Psychology of Gender. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(3), 340-357. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/44289881